Free-form text fields stored in a database often have fixed length limitations. When entering text such as a product description, a user may be challenged to abbreviate terms within the description so that it fits within the limit of the record. If various users abbreviate terms differently, these inconsistencies may creep into the text fields, making them difficult to search and analyze. To complicate matters, the same word may need to be abbreviated differently in different contexts, so as to avoid ambiguity. For instance, if a description contains the terms CONTACT LENSES, it might be acceptable to abbreviate the term CONTACT as CON. However, if a description, or set of related descriptions, contains both CONTACT and CONTROL, it might be conventional to abbreviate CONTACT as CTCT and CONTROL as CTRL to avoid ambiguity. A common approach is for an organization to document abbreviation rules and ask that the employees follow the rules (e.g., to follow a predefined dictionary for certain terms). Also, the IT staff may develop code to enforce the abbreviation rules. However, these conventional approaches may be relatively labor intensive, both to initially develop and later to maintain the predefined dictionary.